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I hate that I’ve reduced her to this. That her behavior has deteriorated to the point of desperation. I can’t blame her; not only has she been dealt the blow of a mother barely interested in parenting, but I’ve been absent too.
And not just while working. Even when I’m in the apartment, right beside my baby, my brain is elsewhere. With Archer and Minka. With the vigilante. With the case files I’ve pulled and spent weeks poring over.
Justin Dowel, murdered by a blade to his throat. Preston James, blade to his throat. Laramie Fentone, blade to his heart. Brantley Tribble, bullet.
The last was self-defense, but still… another tally on Minka Mayet’s bodycount.
She’s a murderer.
And yet, it’s not the crime that makes my stomach hurt, since she’s a murderer of other murderers.
It’s that Mia would’ve been Fentone’s next victim, and I had no clue… no idea that my baby would’ve been taken, and found several days later, broken, bloody, and killed—and onlyafterFentone was done with her body.
Mayet would’ve been the medical examiner. Arch, perhaps the lead detective.
It’s my fucking job to protect my daughter, and she had a target on her back that I neither saw nor removed. Instead, I went about my life, working, flirting with Seraphina Lewis, solving crimes, and playing pool at Tim’s Bar.
I’m mad at myself, because Minka Mayet saved my baby’s life, when it was me who should’ve stepped up. And in thanks, I’ve ostracized her and Archer both, destroyed our friendships, and laid down demands I don’t even want.
I owe Minka my gratitude, and all I’ve managed is poison.
“Daddy!”
Mia’s screams echo all the way down the hall, but when I hear the door at the front of our building whip open, then familiar footsteps exiting before it bounces closed again, I add another sin to my scorecard and turn my back on my daughter.
I charge down the stairs two at a time, hoping I don’t break my neck, then I burst into the morning sunlight and spin in search.
I have two active cases to solve. A gunman to track down. A birthday party to plan. A cake to collect from the bakery. And a hospitalized woman I want nothing more than to make amends with. But I catch sight of Jada’s back at the end of the block, her long hair fluttering in the breeze, and I forget my to-do list and take off like a shot.
“Jada!” I dash past pedestrians, and push aside the anger I feel at their going out for a stroll, despite a fucking gunman on the loose and warnings to stay put. “Jada!”
“Leave me alone, Charlie.” She hugs her duffel bag close, the strap a diagonal across her back, and quickens her pace.
“Jada!”
“I’m leaving.”
She darts down a side street, but I’m faster. More determined. So I follow her in and grab her arm before she can break into a sprint. Then I yank her around, causing her to twirl on her toes the way she did back when we were young. When we were in love. When we had the whole world laid out for us, and no troubles but for her taxing hours in a dance studio, and deciding who would order dinner that night.
“Charlie!”
“Stay!” I push her back against the brick wall and feel a bubble of regret when she hits with a thump and her breath races out on a gust. “Jada.” My heart thunders at an impossible speed. I can still hear, deep in the recesses of my mind, Mia’s cries for me to come home. “Stay with us.”
“I can’t!” Tears burst from her eyes and take me back a decade. So young. So dramatic. “Don’t you get it, Charlie? I’m not welcome here anymore.”
“But you are! I’m pleading for you to stay, offering my spare room for you to live in. Fuck the program, fuck that place, I’m asking you to be here with us.”
“You’re forcing something that isn’t working,” she sobs. “We’ve been at this a month, Charlie.”
“You’ve been clean a month,” I counter optimistically. “That’s a big deal, right?”
“It’s not the—” She swipes tears from her cheeks. “You don’t want me anymore. I don’t fit here.”
“You fit in Mia’s life.” Stepping closer, I grab Jada’s face and force her to look at me. “She needs her mom. She wants you.”
“She wants a mother figure,” she weeps. “She wants the idea of me. But she doesn’t come near me anymore. She doesn’t hug me.”
I loved Jada once, with my entire fucking soul. And maybe I don’t anymore, but her heartache hurts me too.
